Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging to family, people, and land

Evidence

Much of who I am and what I do is wrapped up in my father’s offering by the lakeshore. Each day still begins with a version of “Here’s to the gods of Tahawus,” a thanksgiving for the day. My work as an ecologist, a writer, a mother, as a traveler between scientific and traditional ways of knowing, grows from the power of those words. It reminds me of who we are; it reminds me of our gifts and our responsibility to those gifts. Ceremony is a vehicle for belonging—to a family, to a people, and to the land. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 133

Categorization

• DEFINE: Offers the book’s compact definition of ceremony as ‘a vehicle for belonging,’ with the crucial added motion that gratitude carries responsibility to gifts.
• XREF: Directly parallels chapter 5’s point that landscape beings raise a person into belonging; ceremony and place both function as belonging-vehicles so readers can link this to the earlier claim. — connects to: Ceremony reawakens knowledge and the land recognizes even a lost person — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 129; Cultural loss can make inherited ceremonies feel secondhand and exclusionary — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 128; Ceremonial words of thanks make land and people know each other reciprocally — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 122 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural loss can make inherited ceremonies feel secondhand and exclusionary #complicates (0.85) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 128
• Ceremonial words of thanks make land and people know each other reciprocally #expands (0.80) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 122
• Effective ceremony must be cocreated by community, not appropriated. #qualifies (0.80) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 917
• Tradition discursively connects past, community, and identity. #expands (0.75) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 401
• Ceremony functions as a deliberate mnemonic device for sustaining the gift ethic #expands (0.75) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1424
• Human graduation ceremony offers a template for honoring other species. #expands (0.75) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 915
• Formal ceremony can be engineered to re-sanctify everyday sights. #expands (0.72) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 377
• Displacement applies even to one’s own imagined community and culture #complicates (0.72) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1083
• Exclusion ceremonies psychologically reaffirm the included members’ belonging #corroborates (0.70)